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CHAP TER 7

Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

6:30 in the morning, still dark outside. The alarm squawks at

Zhang Min and her eight- hundred- square- foot apartment in

Chengdu, China, just outside of Chongqing Nan’an. She’d love to

eat something before she leaves, but she needs to make the train

to get to work at Standard Chartered Bank, the British multina-

tional fi nancial services company.

Soon after, she is squeezing through the forest of arms and tor-

sos toward the train door at Nanping station, just like the other

900,000 people using this stop today. Her belly grumbling, she

wishes she’d eaten a boiled egg on the way to the station. It’s hot—

almost 85ºF. It’s going up to 104º today.

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Getting out of the train, she makes her way over to the Chong-

qing Wanda Shopping Centre with ten thousand other employees.

The breeze along Jiangnan Avenue outside feels good on her face,

which is damp from the train. As she approaches the front door of

the branch, she can tell something is going on. There are too many

people in the main lobby for this early in the day. She checks her

watch and quickens her step. The branch doesn’t even open for

another twenty minutes; they can’t be customers.

Some unfamiliar faces— men in red aprons holding trays—

seem to be in the middle of everyone. “Did I miss an announce-

ment?” Zhang Min wonders. She shoots a questioning look to Mai

with raised eyebrows, but Mai only holds up a juice and smiles.

Still confused, Zhang Min tries to squeeze through the crowd

to get to her desk, but an aproned man smiles and hands her a

drink and a warm box. He introduces himself as Jungkiu Choi,

the new head of Consumer Banking. Zhang Min’s heart jumps and

she hopes her fear doesn’t show in her eyes. “But we aren’t ready

yet!” she says, wondering how her branch manager messed up

this visit.

Each year, the Standard Chartered Bank executives make a

pilgrimage to each of its branches. But their visits were always

announced in advance, giving the employees time to prep. Last

year, Zhang Min put in about twenty extra hours, cleaning and

painting the public areas, making all the fi ling systems neat, pre-

paring the PowerPoint presentations. It was hard keeping up with

her usual customer relationship work during this preparation, but

the branch manager was intent on showing the executives a “clean

face.” Now, the executives were here in the building, and Zhang

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

Min and her colleagues had done nothing to make their visit a

good one. Her stress levels rise.

No one else seems anxious, though. Looking around, Zhang

Min sees several of her coworkers are laughing, smiling, and eat-

ing with the head of the region, who is also serving food, wearing

a red apron. Zhang Min can’t believe what she’s seeing. Last year,

she stood waiting outside in the burning sun with drinks, sweat-

ing all the way through her blue blazer, to greet the executives. By

the time they arrived, two and half hours late, the ice had melted.

And, after all the overtime she had worked to prepare for their

visit, she felt melted too.

Today, after everyone has arrived and has had some breakfast,

Jungkiu asks Zhang Min and eight other branch employees to join

him in a “morning huddle.” In a small meeting room, he tells the

team that he would like to discuss what problems are blocking

great customer service at the bank. His job, he tells them, is to try

and eliminate those problems, and he’ll do everything in his power

to help them.

As Zhang Min fi nishes her pastry, she can’t believe what she’s

hearing. Never before has an executive asked her and her col-

leagues how they might solve problems. At last year’s visit, for

example, the team wanted to propose extending the branch’s

hours of operation. But after serving the executives their meal,

presenting their extensive PowerPoint demonstration, and giving

their well- scripted Q&A session for the leaders, they ran out of

time to talk about what mattered most to the branch employees.

Zhang Min shut off after that. “It’s just a job; it pays the bills,” she

thought, and she began to keep her ideas to herself.

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Servant Leadership

When Jungkiu Choi moved to China from Singapore as the new

head of Consumer Banking, he learned that one of the cultural

expectations of his job was to visit the branches as a “superior

commander.” When the previous consumer banking heads made

branch visits, they emphasized the organization’s hierarchy and

their power. This put a lot of pressure on the branches, as staff

would spend weeks anxiously preparing for the visit.

Jungkiu Choi didn’t see the point. In his view, this practice put

a lot of undue stress on the employees, so the visits weren’t pro-

ductive. He saw the leader’s role as something quite different—

imposing authority was not the way to engage his employees in

change. In this chapter, we will see that when leaders are trying to

activate employees’ seeking systems with experimentation, being

humble and trying to learn from employees is more effective than

emphasizing hierarchy. As Gary Hamel once told me: “Show me

what you can get done when you have no budget and no authority.

That’s how you know you’re a leader.”

As one of his fi rst actions in his new role, Jungkiu decided to

lessen the burden of executive visits to branches. Along with his

team, he instituted three key changes from which everything else

fl owed: (1) branches would not be notifi ed of the visit; (2) the visit

would start with executives serving breakfast rather than making

the branch employees wait for executives to arrive and then serve

them meals; and (3) the executives would hold “huddles” and ask

how they could help employees improve their branches. Jungkiu’s

trip to the Chongqing Nan’an branch, where Zhang Min worked,

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

was his fi rst offi cial visit. Along with the head of Consumer Bank-

ing, head of Distribution, and head of the region, he arrived early

and greeted employees with breakfast as they arrived at work.

Many of the employees were very surprised and initially did not

know how to react. But after they received their breakfasts and

talked about their ideas for improving how the branch worked,

they were energized. As one employee wrote in the company bul-

letin: “Jungkiu believes if we want to treat our customers well,

we must treat and surprise the frontline as well. He believes in

servant leadership. Jungkiu, Victor, Alan, and Marco are dressed

in aprons and are serving our staff breakfast. Never seen such

charismatic waiters, right?”

I suggest that Jungkiu’s new approach worked because it

tamped down employees’ fear and encouraged ideation and

self- expression, which activated their seeking systems. The

result? Jungkiu unleashed lots of good ideas and enthusiasm for

improvements.

Although he was achieving good results at the branches, put-

ting this idea into practice wasn’t easy. When he fi rst announced

his new approach, Jungkiu had had trouble convincing other lead-

ers. Many of the executive team members did not support the idea.

They told him: “In China, the boss should retain mystique and can-

not be too close to the front.”

Jungkiu worried about this attitude. He told me: “The funda-

mental question I discussed with my executive team was whether

the job of a business leader is the “emperor”—someone who rules

above you— or the “facilitator”—a vision shaper and bottleneck

remover. If we defi ne ourselves as the former, the leader should

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keep the distance and retain mystique. If we defi ne ourselves as

the latter, the leader should be humble, close, and open.”

Over the course of one year, Jungkiu visited over eighty branches

in twenty- fi ve cities. His consistency helped convince employees

who were skeptical at fi rst that the visits were a “ one- off.” The hud-

dles, focused on employees’ ideas and experiments, were interac-

tive sessions that included role- play around customer conversations

(and usually included laughter and joking). Some of the role- plays

focused on the new customer fi nancial planning tools, and seeing

how they actually worked and where they were diffi cult.

In this way, the new branch visits were work- focused, but they

were fueled by positive emotions created by the seeking system.

The openness of the huddle exposed the most simple of pain points

that Jungkiu could easily help solve (for example, training for the

new bank systems, or making upgrades to computer memory so

that the old computers could handle the new software).

Jungkiu told me that repeating the breakfasts and listening ses-

sions was important because when he took the job, branch employ-

ees’ anxiety about management was as high as their trust was

low. Previous banking heads came to the branches after receiving

their promotion and tried to squeeze performance mainly through

exploitation— cost reduction and short- term tactics— before mov-

ing on to their next job. Jungkiu was the eleventh consumer banking

head in ten years, and many of the employees’ ideas and frontline

pain points had simply not been addressed by previous leaders.

For example, one of the Shanghai branches was inside of a

shopping mall. In the huddle, employees asked Jungkiu if they

could open and close the same times as the mall’s operating hours

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

(rather than the typical branch operating hours). This would

include opening on the weekends. The team wanted to experiment

with working on the weekends. Within a few months, this branch’s

weekend income generation surpassed its entire weekday income.

This was not an idea that Jungkiu had even imagined.

Jungkiu also found that encouraging experimentation increased

peoples’ confi dence to innovate, leading to more enthusiasm and

commitment. He told me: “If you let a call center solve a small

customer dispute, without asking for any reports, I fi nd they man-

age as if they are the owners of the bank. If you impose too many

processes and rules on the call, they mechanically follow the pro-

cesses and rules, without concerning themselves with benefi ts or

costs to the bank or the customers.”

This goes back to the importance of letting employees fi nd the

freedom within the organizational frame. And, Jungkiu’s experi-

ence also echoes what we saw in the Italian white- goods facility in

chapter 5 and the Dealogic example in chapter 6: the seeking sys-

tem generates enthusiasm and an intrinsic motivation to under-

stand and explore, rather than an extrinsic motivation to simply

follow existing approaches.

At another branch in Ningbo, the team asked if they could try

hiring more direct sales staff. They described their opportunities

to serve customers and why they believed they could hire top-

quality talent. The branch manager told Jungkiu, “Ningbo is one of

the richest cities in China, with many young and upwardly mobile

people traveling there from overseas to study. But there are not

many multinational companies these people can work for. So we

could easily hire some of the best people on the market.”

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It was a good idea, but it entailed a lot of work. The branch

employees’ enthusiasm energized them to pull it off. Direct sales

productivity at the Ningbo branch became the highest in the entire

China network. This was not Jungkiu’s idea: this was him activat-

ing people’s seeking systems and then helping them try out their

ideas.

As momentum grew for the new type of branch visits, employ-

ees started uploading pictures they took during the sessions to

Weibo (the Chinese version of Facebook + Twitter). As an infor-

mal (and unpredicted) forum of communication, Weibo turned out

to be far more effective than the more formal medium of company

newsletters.

Jungkiu’s approach to branch visits is another example of a

wise intervention, which we learned about in chapter 3: small but

potent changes, like removing the anxiety around the branch vis-

its and replacing it with serving breakfast and talking about new

ideas, led to very large- scale changes, including a culture of own-

ership and innovation.

In addition to increasing employees’ zest and activating their

seeking systems, these experiments paid off in terms of company

performance. For example, customer satisfaction increased by

54 percent during the two- year period of Jungkiu’s humble lead-

ership. Complaints from customers were reduced by 29 percent

during the same period. The employee attrition ratio had been

the highest among all the foreign banks in China; during the

same period, it was reduced to the lowest among all foreign banks

in China.

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

As Jungkiu said, “I have found that people do not move much

by KPIs and reward/penalty. These cause small changes. People

move in larger ways by noble purpose, emotional connection,

experimenting with new things, and leading by example.”

To put it another way, leaders should see themselves as humble

servants.

Why Does Humble Leadership Work?

To prompt employees’ curiosity and learning through experi-

mentation, a leader can start with the humble purpose of serv-

ing others and being open to learning from employees. Bradley

Owens, a professor at Brigham Young University, and David Hek-

man, a professor at University of Colorado, conducted fi fty- fi ve

in- depth interviews with leaders from a wide variety of contexts.

They found that when leaders express feelings of uncertainty and

humility, and share their own developmental journeys, they end

up encouraging a learning mindset in others. 1

Ironically, humble leadership works not by demanding perfec-

tion, but its opposite— by showing that humans are never perfect

and must explore, fail, and practice in order to learn and improve.

This is the phenomenon we saw with the surgeons in chapter 5,

who successfully learned how to conduct less- invasive heart

surgery not by demanding perfection immediately but by being

open to the team’s needs and focusing the team on learning and

practice.

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Some leaders, as we saw initially with some of Jungkiu’s col-

leagues, are hesitant to follow a humble leadership model. When I

present Jungkiu’s case to leadership teams, their intuition is that

his humble actions of listening to employees and helping them

experiment do not seem how “real leaders” should act, especially

in Far East cultures. They fi nd his story interesting, but then ask,

“Does humility really work? When does it backfi re?”

I would argue that “bureaucratic leadership,” with its reliance

on certainty, decisiveness, and positional power, is detrimental

because it ramps up people’s fear systems, shuts down positive

emotions, and stifl es the drive to experiment and learn. This so-

called executive disease is common because power changes how

leaders view other people— research shows that power causes

people to see others as a means to their ends rather than as intel-

ligent humans with ideas and emotions. 2 In organizational life,

power can result in arrogance and self- importance, and execu-

tives too often use their power to bully and frighten employees

into compliance. 3

Employees’ fear of powerful leaders also creates sycophants,

who buffer leaders from real information. This makes leaders

more and more detached from the reality of work, pain points, and

customers. Unfortunately, this situation feels really good to exec-

utives themselves. As they become very comfortable, they usually

set out to protect and preserve their ego and power. 4 Trying to

learn from employees— and helping employees experiment and

learn with new approaches to work— is not even in their picture.

Remember the concept of learned helplessness from chapter 2—

the experiment in which dogs receiving repeated electric shocks

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

no longer tried to escape their pain? Here’s a thought: arrogance

is often a form of learned helplessness. We all know that learning

can only start if we are willing to acknowledge that we don’t know

everything. But what happens if people work in an environment

where admitting they don’t know everything is viewed by others

as a sign of weakness, and punished? This happens a lot in bank-

ing environments, for example, where people pretend to be “mas-

ters of the universe.”

What if you are a leader who is punished for acknowledging

that others have better information than you? It makes you pre-

tend to know better, when in fact you don’t. In this sense, arro-

gance is a defense system that prevents people from having to

admit they don’t know. Try to put yourself in this banker’s shoes:

“If I admit lack of knowledge, then I am punished, so I can’t learn.

I am rewarded for confi dently faking that I know best when I

don’t.”

This dynamic is important because it stifl es learning and inno-

vation for people in power. Not knowing is ridiculed and punished,

while acting confi dent (even when ignorant) is respected and

rewarded. If we are repeatedly hurt for learning and listening to

others’ ideas, arrogance becomes a form of learned helplessness.

What emerges is an arrogant culture, and learning stops. These

cultures tell employees: “Supervisors don’t want your new ideas

or attempts to innovate.” Maybe this is OK if your company doesn’t

need to change much and you can tell people what to do; it’s disas-

trous if you need agility and employee innovation.

Although it is hard for us all to stay humble and not preen our

egos in the face of bureaucratic power, science clearly shows

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that humble, servant- oriented leadership works. A wave of well-

conducted research investigations over the last ten years have

demonstrated that humble, servant- oriented leadership improves

performance at the individual, team, and organizational level. 5 It’s

not that power in leadership is a bad thing, per se. Humans, like

many other social species, look for leadership from those who do

impressive things that help us or inspire us. This makes us want to

follow them. But during the Industrial Revolution, leadership got

entangled with hierarchy— leaders were assigned power that was

not earned. Humble leadership is more natural, because humble

leaders help other people seek their potential, and experiment

toward that potential. This is a gift that makes other people want

to give back, and want to follow. 6

Here is what we know: humble leaders help people move toward

their full potential, growing and trying new ideas on the job. This

works partly because humble leaders model how to grow to their

followers. Rather than just talking about the importance of learn-

ing and experimenting, humble leaders model how to develop— by

acknowledging mistakes and limitations and being open to listen-

ing, observing, and learning- by- doing. We saw this with Jungkiu at

Standard Chartered Bank, with Dealogic’s Creative Capital exper-

iments, and KLM’s social media experiments.

When an organization needs to adapt and adjust frequently,

humility allows both leaders and followers to be more receptive to

new ideas, criticism, or changes in the external environment. As

one leader said, “Failure fi nds its grace in adjustment.”

Leader humility is an essential tool in the new war for talent.

Employees bring more of themselves to work when their leaders

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

place a priority on activating their seeking systems— by providing

tangible and emotional support to them as they explore new ways

to improve themselves and their environments.

Delivering Creativity

Jungkiu’s experiences at Standard Chartered Bank suggest that

humble leadership can activate employees’ seeking systems even

when anxiety is high. But what about when employees have lapsed

deep into learned helplessness?

Consider a UK food delivery business. Every morning, its

drivers— called roundsmen — deliver essential groceries to cus-

tomers. Early in the morning, hundreds of them load their trucks

and bring milk and bread to more than 1 million customers.

Many of the drivers had worked there for fi fteen to twenty

years, and had long ago soured on management. As is often the

case in organizations, the managers were not respectful of lower-

level employees and their ideas. This is a sort of “creativity apart-

heid”—a class system that can emerge in organizations where

white- collar employees believe themselves to be creative, while

blue- collar employees are not. Over time, drivers became distrust-

ful, shut off their seeking systems at work, and negative emotions

dominated. You could hear it in the roundsmen’s cynical banter

about management as they loaded up their trucks in the depot

before delivery runs.

As the company’s profi ts were being pinched by big delivery

companies like Ocado, the disconnect between management and

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drivers became a bigger problem. With years of a shrinking cus-

tomer base and limited possibilities for growth, the only way the

company could survive was through excellent customer service.

However, the attitudes and behaviors of its employees were mak-

ing it diffi cult to deliver on this possibility. They were not keen on

helping managers implement organizational change, even though

it could preserve their own jobs.

The company hired Duncan Wardley, a director at PwC, to help

it identify the key “moments that matter” for both customers and

staff— key interactions that, if done well, have a disproportionate

impact. Moments that matter are perfect for the wise interven-

tions we learned about in chapter 3.

One of the most important interactions, Wardley and his team

discovered, was the weekly “Roundsman’s Debriefs” between a

depot manager and a delivery person. These meetings happened

once a week and lasted for fi fteen minutes, sometimes less. The

drivers certainly wanted them to be less.

It’s not that the depot managers were bad people— for the most

part, they were salt- of- the- earth types whose hearts were in the

right place about organizational success. But they were old-

school. Their methods for achieving better performance were

authoritarian and paternalistic. They used dominance and anx-

iety to try and force better performance, and that tactic was all

they knew.

These weekly Roundsman’s Debriefs were essentially the depot

managers’ way of letting the drivers know that they were watch-

ing them and were recording their errors for punishment. In these

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

meetings, the depot managers would literally go through a list of

problems: customer complaints, missed deliveries, and the like.

Some people called this “ management- by- clipboard.” The drivers

felt like they were being treated like naughty children. They would

literally stand in front of the depot manager, who was seated at his

desk, as they were grilled about a dirty uniform.

This is where the leadership mindset change was needed to

ignite employees’ seeking systems. Remember what we learned

about humble leadership: it is based on serving employees .

Because management is an overhead cost, managers do not create

value unless they are serving the employees who create the value.

In that light, it’s obvious that the existing format of the Rounds-

man’s Debrief was not a quest to learn and help solve problems.

It was, at best, a parent- child conversation. In fact, to drivers it

did not even feel they were part of a human interaction, but a tick-

box exercise designed to catch them out. Each debrief hurt the

relationship a little more, increasing the confl ict between people

who needed to be partners. The debriefs demoralized, belittled,

and angered the very drivers whom management needed to

deliver world- class service. The strategy and the execution were

not joining up.

Worse, since the Roundsman’s Debriefs were usually one- way

conversations, the managers were preventing themselves from

receiving on- the- ground feedback from drivers. For example,

some of so- called “mistakes” that drivers were making were

actually innovations they had created to streamline processes

and still deliver everything on time. In a more collaborative

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setting, these innovations would have come to light and would

have helped the company deliver better customer service. They

could have been trails into the root cause of the company’s deliv-

ery problems.

Wardley’s dream was to transform these hated meetings into

fi fteen- minute conversations where the primary focus would be

fi nding and experimenting with new ways to deliver excellent

customer service. The goal was for the meetings to be well- run,

two- way, problem- solving dialogues where the depot managers

learned where they could help. In turn, the roundsmen would view

them as positive, helpful conversations. These exchanges, in turn,

could lead to positive impacts on the other “moments that matter,”

like a customer’s initial delivery experience or fi nding new ways

of reducing costs.

Given that negative emotions (including anger and anxiety)

dominated the current culture, how could Wardley turn his dream

into the roundsmen’s reality?

PwC started with a small, wise intervention: take the standard

fi fteen- minute format for the weekly meeting and have managers

start the meeting with a basic servant leadership question: “How

can I help you deliver excellent service?”

PwC ran a coaching program to support depot managers

in getting this right. The program focused on how to conduct

such conversations, and how to identify the rich information

and ideas that could be uncovered through this new style of

interacting. After the new approach was introduced to the

depot managers, they role- played the process with the consul-

tants. Senior leadership also role- played to model the learning

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

process, and to send the message “this really, actually is impor-

tant to us.”

The depot managers clearly did not think this new meeting for-

mat would change anything. And they said so. One of the depot

managers told Wardley: “Listen, I will do this, but I know these

drivers, and it will not work.” The new approach went against

some of their most basic assumptions about how to manage and

motivate the roundsmen.

To assuage their fears, PwC spent time with them, observing

their conversations with delivery people, helping them to under-

stand what they needed to do differently and coaching them

through the entire discussion.

It was slow going at fi rst. Drivers’ dislike of managers was

high, and trust was low. But as depot managers kept asking “How

can I help you deliver excellent service?” some drivers eventu-

ally offered suggestions: “If you want clean uniforms when we

deliver, don’t make us wear our clean uniforms when we load up

the vehicles,” one driver told his manager. In response, the man-

ager bought coveralls that drivers could wear as they loaded the

trucks. Changes like these, however small, built trust, and driv-

ers suggested other ideas. For example, one driver suggested new

products like “Gogurts” and fun string cheese that parents could

get delivered early and pop into their kids’ lunches before school.

Another driver thought of a way to report stock shortages more

quickly so that customers were not left without the groceries they

ordered.

Here we see a virtuous cycle: each positive step led to another,

bigger positive step. One driver’s successful change activated

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three other drivers who saw that change was possible. As shown

in Owens and Hekman’s research on humble leadership, the lead-

ers needed to model serving employees so that employees would

serve customers. 7 For drivers, it felt good to express and get some

of their ideas in place— ideas they had locked away for many years

as they shut off their seeking systems and allowed negative emo-

tions to dominate.

As we saw with the assembly workers in the Italian white- goods

facility, the drivers’ seeking systems were activated because man-

agement listened to their ideas and took action, allowing zest and

enthusiasm to push negative emotions into submission. According

to one area manager: “The management style of the depot manag-

ers changed beyond recognition. They have developed a mutually

respectful working relationship with the delivery people.”

Even the most skeptical depot managers were impressed. What

seemed like an incredibly small and simple change— opening the

once- a- week meeting with a new question— culminated in real

and important changes. When putting a wise intervention into

place, it is important not to expect huge changes all at once. To

overcome the learned helplessness that has built up for decades,

small ideas have to be nurtured and developed. So the fi rst few

innovations and suggestions are likely to be small steps.

For the food delivery company, the ideas for improvements

kept coming in. One driver came in with fi ve pages of handwritten

notes. Another driver suggested delivering Amazon and other par-

cels while they were on their runs. Another proposed dry- cleaning

delivery services.

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Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

Leaders often do not see the true value of their charges,

especially “lower-level” workers: drivers, call-center operators,

mechanics, assembly people. But when leaders are humble, show

respect, and ask how they can help employees do their work bet-

ter, the outcomes can be outstanding. And even more important

than better company results, humble leaders get to act like better

human beings. They get to treat other people as they would like

their own family to be treated.

Wardley and his team implemented a wise intervention. A

single question. But it signaled a different leadership philosophy

and led to very different conversations. This intervention shows

the essence of appreciative inquiry , which breaks the cycle of

depersonalization that shuts off employees’ personal creativity. 8

As described in chapter 3, small changes like this can have hidden

leverage when they focus on an emotionally vulnerable interac-

tion, because it changes the basic story people tell themselves.

As the roundsmen got credit for their ideas and saw them put into

place, they grew more willing to offer more ideas, which made

the depot managers more impressed and more respectful, which

increased the roundsmen’s willingness to give ideas, and so on.

As the roundsmen’s seeking systems kicked in, the company got

so many ideas about how to delight its customers that the bigger

problem became how to deal with all the ideas. In the end, PwC

helped managers segment the ideas into cost and benefi t. They

worked on implementing the simple, easy, and cheap ones (wear

aprons over the uniforms) and making others into requests for

capital (deliver wider range of products).

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After a few weeks, the depot manager who had disputed the

plan said, “I thought I knew these roundsmen. I’ve had to eat

so much humble pie over last two weeks I’ve put on two stone

[ twenty- eight pounds]!” Another told Wardley, “There is a tangible

difference. I simply wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with

my own eyes.”

Often, what causes big changes to happen and to stick is not

logical. It’s emotional. Wardley told me something that matched

Jungkiu’s words: “Real change is not achieved by simply offering

rewards or appealing to people’s reason. Instead, you have to tap

into people’s emotions. This means engaging with them in a differ-

ent way— engaging with their sense of meaning and their intrinsic

desire for self- expression.”

An area manager summarized what a difference this made: “We

really thought that we knew our delivery people inside out, but

we’ve realized that there was a lot we were missing. Our weekly

customer conversation meetings are now more interactive and the

conversations are more honest and adult in their approach. It’s

hard to put into words the changes we are seeing.”

It’s pretty common for leaders to say that people don’t like change.

And many courses on leading change are dedicated to “overcom-

ing employee resistance.” I fi nd it helpful to think about it the

opposite way: people are really good at change.

Compared with all the other animals, humans are the ones

doing all the change. When you look at our species’ behavior rela-

tive to the others, we’re the change animals. This seems to be the

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135

Humble Leadership and Employees’ Seeking Systems

outcome when our seeking systems (which other mammals share)

teams up with the prefrontal cortex (the new part of our brain that

lets us simulate the future, which other mammals don’t share). 9

Put these two parts of the brains together, and humans are biolog-

ically wired for innovation and change.

For example, we’re not supposed to fl y. Think about the other

animals that don’t have wings. What do they do? That’s right: they

just walk around. They take what is on offer from the world, and

they get on with it. That is not how the human species acts. We

just don’t accept what the world has on offer. Remember, the

world did not foist smartphones and artifi cial intelligence and

blockchain technology onto us. The world is not doing this to

us; we are doing this to ourselves. Thinking back to the increas-

ing pace of innovation described in chapter 2, it’s clear that the

human animal is built for experimentation, learning, and innova-

tion (see fi gure 7-1).

Now, we just need to learn how to activate these urges of the

seeking system within the frame of organizational life. In both

the UK food delivery example and the Chinese banking example,

Activates

UrgesSeekingsystem

ExperimentationWhite goodsDealogicShell OilKLMStandard Chartered BankFood delivery

FIGURE 7-1

Experimentation activates the seeking system

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we saw how even disgruntled employees in learned helplessness

mode can reactivate their seeking systems— when leaders are

able to be humble, listen, and give them a chance to explore their

environments and improve things. And the result is not just better

products and services, it also is more enthusiasm and zest. People

become alive at work.

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